When a web page is loaded into a browser, content can be pulled from multiple locations in order to gain all the information referenced by the web page so that the web page can be rendered. Modern web pages are generally comprised of a variety of different types of information that relate to various different things. For example, a typical web page may comprise one or more main items of interest such as a news article, story, blog post, or other item, ancillary items such as the local weather, sports scores, or other items, navigation or other mechanisms to navigate to different posts, stories, articles, and so forth, advertisements for various items, subscriptions, and so forth, links to other sites, web pages, and a vast array of other information. A typical web page can require many of these items to be pulled from widely different data sources. Sometimes finding and retrieving an item requires the browser to go through multiple redirects to track down the present location of the items to be downloaded. Furthermore, much of the content associated with a web page holds little or no interest to the user who requested the web page.
Because of the numerous data sources and rich content of the various items, much time and bandwidth can be required to retrieve all the data prior to rendering a web page. This translates into increased power consumption and the additional content slows down web page rendering. For mobile devices and/or devices that operate on battery power, this translates into higher bandwidth costs and/or reduced runtime. Furthermore, any unwanted content downloaded from the web will be stored in the web browser cache which consumes file system free space and can cause additional wear on the FLASH memory devices. Lastly some of the content displayed may be offensive to the sensitivities of the user.
It is within this context that the present embodiments arise.